Open Source: Asheville wants tourists back | Cooper’s farewell | Amazon fires union leader
.jpg "RAD Fest 1.0 was an arts festival held in the River Arts District in November for artists impacted by Helene.")
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
The unparalleled storm started an unprecedented PR campaign.
“We are more aggressively promoting winter travel than we ever have before, Visit North Carolina’s director of tourism research Marlise Taylor told economic leaders this week at the board meeting of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina. “I’ve been here almost 20 years, and I’ve never seen winter promotions like this.”
This investment is understandable. Two months after Helene hit, the tourism figures coming out of Western North Carolina have been troubling. Demand for vacation rentals has fallen, Taylor said, even in communities far outside Asheville that weren’t impacted by the storm. In the city itself, rental demand was down 24% in October. That’s notable for a place whose local baseball team is nicknamed the Tourists.
Interest in visiting North Carolina overall dropped between August and October, according to a Visit NC survey, as three in four said they thought mountain towns needed months to recover.
But Helene’s destruction wasn’t all-encompassing. While it battered parts of Western North Carolina, gutting several small downtowns and sweeping away rows of homes, other pockets of the tourism-reliant region are eager for visitors to return. Helene wrecked Asheville’s River Arts District and Biltmore Village, but the downtown was largely unscathed. Taylor said parts of the River Arts District have reopened as the city recently lifted its boiling water advisory.
Visit North Carolina is the state’s official tourism marketing arm. It historically only advertises to residents in other states, but that’s changed since Helene. With $5 million in extra funding from the General Assembly, the group has launched a Western NC recovery campaign that features the opulent Biltmore Estate, downtown Asheville, small towns and ski resorts. These will appear in North Carolina as well as the top visitor markets of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama.
However, Visit NC seeks more public money to assist with the PR recovery. On Thursday, Taylor asked the General Assembly to appropriate another $10 million to add to the organization’s $11 million annual budget.
At the meeting, Taylor displayed the state’s post-Helene tourism tagline: “Our best way to get back is for you to come back.”
Cooper gives economic farewell speech
Gov. Roy Cooper stopped by the EDPNC meeting Thursday to say goodbye. With his term end in sight, the governor framed the state’s economic performance over his eight years as “a great comeback story.”
“I was sworn in at 12:01 am January 1, 2017. And while I physically took the oath of office in the state capitol, I stood amid the rubble of the sweeping discriminatory HB2, the broken bits and pieces of our state’s reputation and our economy, the dashed hopes of so many people and a pervasive fear that we might never get back to where we were,” he said. “Major companies were (canceling) fully planned economic development deals, perhaps some of those ones that you guys were working on, musicians and entertainers were canceling shows, sporting events were moving to other states.”
One metric he’s likely proud of: In the three years before Cooper became governor, North Carolina finished 5th, 9th and 5th in the annual CNBC rankings of best business states. In the last three years, the state has finished 1st, 1st and 2nd.
Plea to end NC’s local broadband ban
What is the most important thing the General Assembly can do to advance technology in the state? For Tom Snyder, executive director of the Raleigh nonprofit RIoT, the answer is to free up local broadband. Speaking on a panel during the busy EDPNC meeting, Snyder urged the state to remove its ban on municipal governments providing broadband to their residents.
“The value proposition for broadband in rural areas is sometimes hard to balance for the private sector,” he told me after the meeting. “We should consider broadband to be a basic utility, not a nice-to-have.”
North Carolina’s local broadband prohibition dates back more than a decade to a fight with Wilson County, which today is the only municipality in the state that’s allowed to offer it.
Clearing my cache
- Amazon last week fired the worker behind the union effort at the company’s massive Wake County warehouse. The company and worker, Ryan Brown, disagree on the reason for his dismissal: Amazon says the cause was his disparaging and racist speech at work while Brown alleges he was illegally fired due to his labor organizing.
- Triangle towns like Cary and Morrisville have begun using people-counting sensors to measure occupancy levels in public spaces. But a new study from Duke and UNC, conducted at the RDU airport security checkpoint, suggests similar sensors aren’t always reliable.
- Roughly 630,000 consumers are getting refunds from the Federal Trade Commission, two years after the agency levied a historic fine against Cary video game maker Epic Games. The fine was over deceptive payment tactics in Epic’s uber-popular game Fortnite.
- Inventor of the plasma screen and longtime NC State professor Donald Bitzer died this week at 90. His work in the 1960s led to modern flat screen TVs.
- Element451, a Raleigh startup whose software helps colleges recruit students — and helps students stay enrolled — received a $175 million strategic investment from the private equity firm PSG. The deal marks an exit for Durham’s Cofounders Capital, an early investor in Element451.
I’ve been interested in the decrease of North Carolina startup IPOs, and Element451 might be another example. Another private exit avenue has become stronger. “What’s happened is that these PE funds have gotten so big, and they have so much money now, they’ve kind of stolen the IPO market,” Cofounders Capital founding partner David Gardner said in an interview this week.
National Tech Happenings
- Grocery chain Albertson nixed a $25 billion merger with fellow supermarket giant Kroger (owner of Harris Teeter) after a federal judge stopped the potential deal.
- Love is Blind contestants are workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled, in a decision that should make wider ripples in the reality TV industry.
- A three-judge panel upheld the TikTok ban last week, meaning the video platform faces a ban on Jan. 19 unless its Chinese parent company divests. TikTok then filed an emergency motion to block the ban. The Department of Justice urges judges to oppose TikTok’s effort.
- Google unveiled a quantum computing breakthrough this week. The company says its Willow computing chip solved a contrived (i.e. not a real-world) problem in minutes that would take a classical supercomputer 10 septillion years. A septillion has 24 zeros.
Thanks for reading!
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 9:40 AM.
